Waffle, Waffle, Waffle

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but annoyance has its part to play as well.

I just went to an in-person community meeting run by decent people in favor of an excellent cause. It's going to be my last in-person attendance in this community though, and the reason has nothing to do with health or safety.

The meeting started promisingly enough, with cards being handed out to capture peoples’ questions. Most of us spent the whole meeting staring at that small stack of cards on the chairman's desk at the front of the hall, wondering when they would finally get to us. The answer was, never.

Instead, a series of increasingly less important local political figures talked the whole 90 minutes away as they seized the microphone for one speech after another, leaving themselves 15 minutes at the end for questions from a hall of about 60 people who had driven miles to attend.?The big boss finally announced that the questions were all the same and therefore wouldn't be addressed. The remaining 15 minutes of the meeting were spent with more waffle from minor politicians.

The thing is, I still strongly support the cause of this community meeting. But, I've attended my last in-person session. It's a thought I might not have had in these explicit terms two years ago, but driving home it occurred to me with great clarity that the purpose of this meeting could have been met with an email and a few links to file attachments or video files. Anyone who wanted to watch the speeches could have done so. If they schedule any further meetings, I'll be sitting at home, dialing in by video link, letting the video play in the background while I do something else. The whole purpose of showing up in person was to have inclusion and discussion, and by offering neither, they blew it.

That's a higher standard than I might have had for meetings even two years ago. I'm an older guy, and I've been to thousands of meetings where there was no inclusion. But now, after a year plus of enforced online everything, I find myself applying elevated expectations to in-person meetings. And judging by the discussion I had afterwards with people standing on the pavement - who also aren't going to attend these sessions in person anymore - I don't seem to be the only one.

I'm a very strong advocate for face-to-face communication, and would argue that there is a great deal of both objective and empirical evidence in favor of that position. All that evidence has to do with the value of inclusive debate and direct human contact. However, with the technologies now available, if these things aren't properly leveraged then the case for face-to-face meetings goes away.

On the other hand, had that meeting been run properly and in a way that was respectful of all the folks who had driven miles to attend after a long day at work, it might have been a very different matter. We would have felt seen and included, and driven home happy.

In future, before attending a face-to-face meeting, I'll be asking if there will be enough inclusion and discussion, enough outreach and debate, to respect each and every human being who chooses to make the physical journey.?And if there's not, and if the option exists, I'm going to join the army of people who do it by email and from home, often with only partial attention.

Don't get me wrong. I still strongly support face to face interaction and still believe all the evidence that it’s by far the best way to get things done if there's human connection.

It's possible, though, that one of the enduring legacies of lockdown may be that there will now be a higher standard and a higher level of expectation for face-to-face meetings.

If that's the case, it can't come soon enough.